She dreamed not of the fight he foughtTill lo, he crept againTo her, with all his vows forgot——Then, then she knew his pain.
She dreamed not of the fight he foughtTill lo, he crept againTo her, with all his vows forgot——Then, then she knew his pain.
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
Humor is the tail to the kite of affection.—"The Silver Poppy."
"Oh, I'm disgusted with myself, with everything," said Hartley, impatiently going to his window, where through the drifting rain he could see the misty gray Palisades of the Hudson and a little scattered fleet of sailing craft dropping down with the tide. Then he went as impatiently back to his chair again.
"What's gone wrong?" asked Repellier, who had run up for a few minutes when the darkness of the day had put a stop to his work to see how Hartley was taking to his new quarters. "Is it the engine itself out of order? Are you feeling fit, and all that?"
"Confound it, I don't knowwhatit is!"
"You're comfortable enough here?"
"Yes, I suppose so."
"No disquieting neighbors?" asked the other, casually glancing at a new photograph of the author of The Silver Poppy in a heavy silver frame that stood on Hartley's mantelpiece. "You know you're too young to indulge in the luxuries—just yet."
"How do you mean?" asked Hartley, pulling himself together.
"I thought you might be falling in love. Young men have a habit of doing that, you know."
"No, no; it's not that."
He glanced up and caught the quizzical look in his friend's eyes. "In love, Repellier? I—in love! I couldn't be if I wanted to. I—without a farthing, with a name to make, and a living to make first."
"The living doesn't count; that's a mere accident—with the artist, I mean."
"Oh, yes; you successful fellows, who have covered yourself with glory—you find it easy enough to cover yourself with—with flannel and fine linen."
"But work only for the glory, the flannel and fine linen will take care of itself."
"It sounds very pretty, but it keeps one—well, rather lonely and hungry."
"Yes, but those things are all grist to your mill in the end. Disappointment, loneliness, sorrow, every shred of experience, if you only look at it in the right way, it's all your grist—if you're the bigger and truer artist." Repellier himself went to the window and looked out for a moment before he turned and spoke again. "And, by the way, do you know the receipt for preserving a poet? It's very simple; an empty stomach, an empty pocketbook, and an empty bed."
"It doesn't always hold," demurred Hartley.
"No, but as a rule the less Laura and the more sonnets, my young Petrarch."
Before Repellier's musing and kindly old eyes at that moment drifted a hazy memory—the memory of a pale, fragile girl in a Bath chair, listening to the English skylarks on a terraced lawn. She had been speaking to him, tremulously yet passionately, of her young Oxford scholar, her hero; she had been telling of her great hope in him, of her woman's fears for him, winning a friend for him there while she already saw before her the valley of the shadow. "Oh, be kind to him! Be kind to him!" she had cried impulsively, with her hand on her heart and the tears welling to her mournful eyes.
Hartley remained moodily silent, and Repellier at last went over to him.
"Now before an old David leaves this tent of Saul, my boy, let me give you a little advice. Try hard work. It's God's own anodyne. When the heart gets down—and it will, you know—or the head goes wrong, work. Work, man, work; that's my doctrine. You'll do your best when you are either very happy or very miserable. But when in doubt, work; work like a soldier, yet remember that the artist, like the soldier, can stand for the worst as well as the best in man."
Hartley, pacing his room alone when Repellier had taken his departure, knew all this to be true enough. But it could not do away with the canker of unrest and self-disgust that seemed gnawing at the core of his brain.
A dozen times that day he sat down at his desk, ready for work; and a dozen times he got up in despair. The mood of impotence, of dissatisfaction, was on him, and was not to be shaken off. He tried to tell himself that it was not of the heart, that it was not love. The very doubt brought its own answer. Eros, he felt, had a way of always claiming his own.
As the disturbing scenes of the night before kept crowding mockingly up into the foreground of his consciousness, he tried to hug to his remembrance some alleviating happier sense of escape that had flashed through him at the bathetic ending of it all. He persuaded himself that he was still heart-free; if there had been a time when he had ever questioned his attitude toward Cordelia, that time, he insisted, was now past. If ever he should wander again, vehemently he told himself, it must be with his eyes open, and with no extenuating madness of romance to break his fall.
Those hours of cold reaction chilled him into something like his old-time austerity. He decided to write to Cordelia and make everything plain to her. It was a wandering and incoherent little note of contrition, the cry of a troubled Hamlet to a still trusting Ophelia. He had been entirely to blame. He had been thoughtless. He had been, too, ungenerous and unkind to her. He wanted only to be reinstated as her most loyal and truest friend. He did not deserve her trust, but he intended to show her the depths of his remorse—O repentant and heartless Adonis, how could you!—in the only way that lay open to him, by striving to the last for her success, by helping her in every way that he could, by laboring as he had never labored before on what should be her great book.
It may have been only that last sentence which saved the lady so sorrowfully addressed from tearing his letter into shreds. And the word "friend" had hurt her above all things. But hereafter he should be the supplicant.
Cordelia decided not to reply to his note. Restlessly and aimlessly all that day and all the next he waited, one moment even half hoping some impending estrangement would shake loose those ever-tightening shackles, which he had begun to feel weighing heavily upon him, and the next moment half dreading that any such freedom should come to him, cast down miserably by the thought that she had in any way passed out of his life.
While this humor of unrest still hung over him he took down his brightly bound copy of The Silver Poppy and read it through studiously, from first to last. The sense of its exceptional power came to him once more, as a revelation reiterated. He found it a book where the gleaner caught at much which the more hurried harvester must miss, a book yielding, as he felt all good books should yield, a new and unexpected delight in its second reading. Outside the manifest strength and movement of the story there was the secondary charm of a quiet and masterly touch. Its satire was delightful and insidious, and through its merriest pages he found the Touchstone-like pensiveness of one who knew and understood a sad old wag of a world. He found in it, too—and this puzzled him most—still that sense of eternally saving humor of which he had seen so little in Cordelia herself. From page to page it flashed out at him, it tripped him up, and danced about him. He began to understand the better why The Silver Poppy had been called one of the novels of the year, even of the century. He thought he saw now just what Cordelia had meant when she had timorously asked him if he thought it possible that she had written herself out in one book. That early, crocus-like flowering of the spirit was no less beautiful because it was already over and gone with the April of life.
Where in that little body had such wisdom and power once been packed away? She had always seemed such a fragile, shell-tinted thing to him, the wonder was that she had written a book at all, that in one eloquent interval she had found a voice, and delivered her message. But was that one work alone to stand the key to that strangely reticent soul of hers? Had she, as with those little East Side fruit-shops he knew so well, ranged all her stock in trade out on the public sidewalk, and left empty the store itself?
The thought of a bewildered but aspiring artist, caged in a body so incongruously frail and girlish, filled him with a pity for the sorrowing laborer struck helpless in the midst of her work—for the writing hand fallen helpless in the midst of its dreams. He suddenly felt that he should be willing to go through fire and water to bring one laurel leaf to that small, proudly poised head with its profusion of yellowish golden hair. And with this mood the grayness seemed to go out of the world. And still again he asked himself if this could be love.
"With a snub-nosed Helen, my boy," Repellier had once said, "there would never have been a Trojan war." Hartley, valiant with the wine of his new resolve, straightway began to wonder how or why he had so recently posed as a second Schopenhauer to this same Repellier, and cried in disgust that everything had already been sufficiently cursed or sufficiently sung. His passion for work came back to him with a bound. The Cyrus of unrest that had diverted his better thoughts from their natural channel seemed to have marched on and left the Euphrates of his heart in full flood once more. He knew that his vague mental acrisia had at last come to a turn, and was to be followed by its violent fever to create, to build.
In one illuminating moment he saw that the modern life about which it was now his task to write was no less strenuous and no less varied than the life of those earlier days toward which he had fallen into the habit of looking back so regretfully. But it was in the inner rather than in the outer life, he felt, that the greater intensity and interest were now to be found. It was the mental career of men and women that was becoming more complex and more varied; and it was in this, he saw, that the broader and more enduring field of the novelist lay. At times, indeed, the alluring complexity and bewildering activity of this inner subjective world spread before him like an endless valley of untrodden twilight, shot through with some emotional golden glory of retrospection. And he longed for some fuller power to pierce into it, and grasp it, and interpret it.
With this elemental touch of rapture still clinging about him he went back to his manuscript of The Unwise Virgins. The spell of The Silver Poppy too seemed, in some way, still pregnantly close to him, and through some little trick of the hand or mind he found himself from time to time dropping into the touch of that earlier effort.
He began at the first and rewrote the entire book. Whipping his earlier erratic chapters into line, he quirted and corralled the herd of them into one unified, crowded whole. He went at his manuscript with a trace, almost, of the madman in him as he worked. Sometimes he ate, and sometimes he forgot to, or refused to spare time for it. He worked late into the night; sometimes all night long. He worked as he had seen Oxfordshire farmers working at raising bees, under stress and the cry of excitement, lifting and heaving beyond his natural strength, with an ardor that was to leave him stiff and sore, yet with the balm of knowing that one hour of exhilaration, to the artist, was worth its day of depression.
When his brain balked he lashed it on with strong coffee and stimulants, living, most of the time, on tobacco and innumerable milk-punches. He saw no one, and he wanted to see no one. It lasted two, almost three weeks; he was not sure, for toward the end he lost count of the days.
But the end came at last, and he awoke one evening and discovered that his face had been unshaved for days, that his eyes were bloodshot and sunken, that he was hollow of cheek and shaken of nerve, and that he was unspeakably hungry. His brain seemed a sponge that had been squeezed dry, to the last bitter drop, and he felt old, listless, worn out. But even through that dull pain of fatigue he felt the mysterious and inextinguishable flame of happiness, of triumph in accomplishment.
All his work, he knew, was not yet done, but the pill was there, as he put it, and the sugar coating could be applied later, and at his leisure. The structure was there; he could take his own time and go in his own way about the removal of the scaffolding. But the days of sweat and noise were done.
That was the way, he felt, that he would always have to write, racing on to the end, with the wind in his ears while it lasted. It was a costly way, perhaps, and an unsafe one; but with him it would always have to be the only way. A sense of the mystery of creation had seized him at times, the thought that the thing born of the travail of the mind came not from within, but from some unknown source without; that it was inspirational; that it was the cry of a voice not always his own.
With the hand of this mystery Hartley tried to brush away the incongruity that existed between The Silver Poppy and the character of the woman who had written it. Cordelia herself, he argued, might have known her moments of spiritual metamorphosis. Into her fingers, too, might have been thrust a tool more potent than the hand that held it. Yet he felt that his work was his own, and as his own he took an indefinable, jealous pride of ownership in it. But it had been done for another; and if in this case the tool had fallen to him and had been denied her, how little less hers than his, he tried to tell himself, were the pages before him.
Some busy little spider of delusion seemed to have woven its web across a corner of his mind, and he could not think the problem out as he wished to.
Then the reaction set in. He went out into the freshness of the night air, hoping to brush away that tenuous film of doubt and bewilderment that still teased his thoughts. His face was flushed and hot, but a chill, beginning in his limbs, had seized his body, and tingling little feet of ice seemed running up and down his back. He sniffed at the fresh river air, and remembered that he had taken no exercise of late, that the engine, as Repellier called it, had been overdriven and neglected. He had a sudden desire to get away from the quietness and loneliness that hung about him. He wanted to get down into the thick of the city and feel life pressing against his sides.
The wind chilled him, so he turned southward and walked aimlessly down through what had ever seemed to him the veritable backyard of all New York. The desolation of those quiet streets drove him Eastward, and dragging his way down the light-spangled, wave-like rise and fall of Amsterdam Avenue, he plodded onward until the flaring sign of a restaurant caught his eye. He went inside and sat down at a little table, and there he ate ravenously—he scarcely remembered what.
Then his spirit of unrest came over him again, and as he wore his way southward he felt that he should like to see Chatham Square once more; a caprice to smell the air of the slums came over him. But his old quarters, he remembered, were too far away to be seen that night. So he turned down into lower Fifth Avenue, and wandered idly on, gazing at times up at the quiet stars, and the great white cross of light that shone from the Mission House, over the Arch and tangled tree tops of Washington Square. Then the lure of lights to the south caught his eye, and he drifted into Thompson Street, turning once more erratically eastward, while for a moment a sudden dizziness came over him and he had to lean against an iron railing for support. Before him the clustered globes of an Italian music-hall chanced to flare its invitation to all passers-by, and he stumbled in, glad of an opportunity to rest. He groped his way to the half-underground ill-smelling bar and asked for wine. There he drank three glasses of acid and biting Chianti, and felt better. He was still weak and dazed, however, so he stepped into the crowded music-hall at the rear, and sank limply into one of the vacant chairs.
The odor of tobacco and garlic reeked in the air, and an orchestra of a half-dozen pieces was crashing out a medley of operatic selections. Olive-skinned venders of fruit, stoop-shouldered ragpickers, hard-handed organ-grinders, all sat and looked with rapt faces toward the diminutive proscenium-arch at the end of the hall, beyond which was a lurid painting of the Bay of Naples. When Signorina Elisa Venezia came to the footlights and sang a Venetian boat-song—it took Hartley back to the night of Repellier's birthday party—a low-browed Neapolitan sitting next to him pounded on the table with his beer-glass, and the sudden applause and shouting was deafening, volcanic. He wondered at the fire of their Latin enthusiasm. An ape-like old man tottered and mumbled through the gesticulating crowd, selling meal-cakes. When a corpulent woman in a tawdry yellow costume, swaying her huge body to the throb of the music, sang an Italian love-song that seemed familiar to the crowd, the ape-like old man crouched down on the edge of his blackened basket and listened to the end, with fixed, filmy, eager eyes.
The scene of a sordid and toil-hardened people finding solace in music brought home to Hartley how much he himself had been missing from life; how narrow, of late, his days had grown to be. The chance to wring out of existence its richest wine was before him, had been thrust upon him, and he had neglected it.
As he walked wearily home through the cold night air he determined, with a sudden passionate clutching of his hands, to take what was his due, to grasp at what lay before him in life. He was tired of all empty and enslaving work; the tide had met its turn. A Nietzsche-like madness to throw open his man's arsenal of instinct, a longing to fling his weight against every iron law that seemed, at the moment, to choke and overrun and stultify life, filled him with a sense of tingling opposition. To battle Byronic-like against convention, to ride the whirlwind like the old gods of life, but to fight always, and for all things—that seemed to him life, and the best of life.
And in something that was almost delirium, in one white flash of inspirational, subliminal clearness, came to him the first ideas of his poem on War—a poem which he worked out feverishly, yet not unhappily, during the next few days of culminating weariness and illness, little dreaming of the part it was soon to play in lives other than his own.
And though idle as scholars we stand,Where they pilfer and swarm in our home,The honey of power waits the handBut daring to pilfer the comb.
And though idle as scholars we stand,Where they pilfer and swarm in our home,The honey of power waits the handBut daring to pilfer the comb.
John Hartley, "The Siren City."
A cynic, is he? Then take all he says with an ounce of civet and a grain of salt.—"The Silver Poppy."
To Cordelia over her coffee-cup Mrs. Spaulding confided a remarkable example of her husband's perversity.
Their talk had drifted round to this point because of a scene, of which Cordelia had been an unfortunate witness, the night before. A flurry of unexpected bills had come in at the first of the month. After looking them over, the alert and ever-keen business instinct of Alfred Spaulding had at first gently and then quite vigorously rebelled against what seemed to him nothing but wanton extravagance. A florist's bill in particular—it was for eight hundred dollars—had startled him into indignation, though Mrs. Spaulding remained heroically silent as to the fact that the great bulk of that bill had been due to the unconsidered visits of Cordelia, and had been quite as much a surprise to her as it now was to her husband.
It was not often that his equable temper showed the effect of the storm and stress through which his tired nerves went day by day. Nor was it often that to his wife he spoke in anything stronger than an accent of mild protest. But on rare occasions his patience became exhausted, and at such times she was given to understand—with a display of great anger, always ultimately atoned for by the arrival of significant little boxes from the Spauldings' jeweler—that her husband was not altogether the pliant and passive man which more than one of her friends, and even she herself at times, had been led to believe him.
Mrs. Spaulding sighed heavily.
"And Alfredmakeshis money so easily!" she said.
"Why does he work so hard, anyway?" asked Cordelia.
"Oh, he says he's got the working habit, and can't shake it off. He gets lonely and restless when he's not busy. He always says it's too late for him to try to change now. But I can't see why he is always fussing about things this way," she went on fretfully, pushing back the little cluster of tradesmen's bills with a dimpled but disdainfully indignant hand, on which glittered not a few heavily jeweled rings. "He understands the market, and all he has to do is invest, and then just watch things, and—er—all that; and then take his money out again. That oughtn't to be such hard work, ought it?"
"And doesn't he ever lose?" Cordelia asked.
"Of course, my dear, sometimes. But Mrs. Herrington—her husband is in Wall Street, too—told me they neverhaveto lose unless they like; unless they want to lead the others on, and that sort of thing, you see. But I never bother about business. Alfred doesn't seem to like it."
"It must take years to understand it all," Cordelia ventured, toying absent-mindedly with the sugar-tongs.
"I think some men are born businesslike, my dear, the same as they're born bow-legged, or with big feet."
She wondered why Cordelia smiled, and then went on: "Why, only a little over a month ago Alfred's brother Louis, you know, sent him three thousand dollars from Milwaukee, to invest. Alfred was going to send it back, but I justmadehim do it. He put it in some kind of steel. Then he worried so much about it that he took it all out again in less than a week. Even then he made over eight hundred dollars for poor Louis. Just think what it might have been if he'd only left it in right along."
It was this innocent and quite accidental piece of information which gave a new turn to the tide of Cordelia's thoughts.
In her own little yellow-covered bank-book she had a balance of some nineteen hundred dollars. Why should not this, she asked herself, be sent to that mysterious land of magic, Wall Street, and in time come back to her doubled, perhaps trebled? For many months of late she had indefinitely felt the need of more substantial resource than that already at her command.
Why, indeed, could not Mr. Spaulding do for her what he had already done for his brother out in Milwaukee?
She said nothing of her plans, but little by little resumed her regular morning drives with Mr. Alfred Spaulding down to his office, a matter in which she had been more or less remiss of late. Alfred Spaulding, in fact, objected to taking his carriages into Wall Street at all, and had forsworn the elevated railway only because his more practical wife—more practical in this thing, at any rate—insisted that he should get at least half an hour's open air each day.
Cordelia greatly surprised that absent-minded gentleman one morning by timidly putting a little cut-glass vase on his desk, into which she slipped an American Beauty rose. Although she had talked to him a great deal, and about many things, it was nearly a week before she approached the matter that lay nearest her heart.
"Women sometimes—er—put their money into stocks, don't they?" Cordelia asked tentatively, as they bowled briskly down Fifth Avenue one bright morning.
"Yes, and nearly always lose it, too," was Mr. Spaulding's discouraging and somewhat curt reply.
"But if they are certain about the right thing?"
"They never are. No one is."
"But if they have a friend in Wall Street, a friend who knows—" ventured Cordelia.
"Then the friend never knows. My advice is for women to keep out of Wall Street."
"But aren't there any stocks that are safe? I mean, aren't there any good onesyoufeel certain about, for instance?"
"Of course; but those are the kind you never make your money out of—at least not at the rate women want to make it. They're slow and steady."
"But you've been in Wall Street so long! Surely there's something you feel to be safe and yet going to go up, too?"
The ghost of a smile crept over his worn face.
"Miss Vaughan, if I had that delightful power, I'd make a million before I came home for dinner to-night."
"But didn't you make nearly a thousand dollars for your brother Louis?" she asked, after a pause.
"Yes, I did; and it caused me more bother and worry than making eighty times that much out of my own money. Louis is a pretty poor man, you know."
"Yes?" said Cordelia.
"It meant a good deal to him. If I hadn't carried him over on my own shoulders he'd have been hard hit."
"I don't think I should mind the risk."
"One never does, till one tries it."
"Iwantto try." Then after a moment's pause she said: "Mr. Spaulding."
"Well?"
"Mr. Spaulding, I've two thousand dollars," she had not quite that sum, but she knew that she could easily make it up by means of a loan from his wife—"and I intend to speculate with it. Won't you invest it for me?"
"Miss Vaughan, I've made it a rule, an inexorable rule, never to take a woman's money in the Street."
"Please!"
"You know lessons there usually cost about a thousand dollars a second."
"I'd be sorry to go to some one I didn't know," she pouted girlishly, and then she added, "or didn't trust."
"Yes, I think probably you would, afterward."
"But I shall," she said determinedly. As to this the man of business made no reply.
The next morning she slipped a bunch of English violets into his little cut-glass vase.
"Won't you?" she pleaded again in her softest voice.
He looked at the flowers, at his waiting mail, and then at the girl—or was she not a woman?—herself.
"Yes, yes," he said wearily. She took his hand and fondled it as a child might. With all his business he was a somewhat lonely man.
"We'll see what we can do with it," he added more cheerily, in a little glow of latent gallantry that left him feeling uncomfortable and hot. Then he touched an electric button and his private secretary appeared with a bundle of notes and documents in his hand, and Cordelia slipped away triumphant.
It was her one and only financial plunge. Although Alfred Spaulding never confessed to her that the precariousness of his venture on her behalf cost him two long nights of sleeplessness, it was more successful than he or even she herself had hoped for. Out of it she made twenty-two hundred dollars.
The man of Wall Street, not unnaturally, silently braced himself for another scene with her, determined that this time she should not prevail. Perhaps she saw this, or perhaps she realized that for once sheer luck had gone with her. At any rate, to her host's surprise, and not a little to his inner satisfaction, she placed the money in her own bank and said nothing more of the matter.
She prayed that night for his pure soul,And thanked her new-found GodThat he returned unscathed and wholeTo that white world he trod.
She prayed that night for his pure soul,And thanked her new-found GodThat he returned unscathed and wholeTo that white world he trod.
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
A woman's last love is always arechaufféof her first.—"The Silver Poppy."
Hartley had to wait in the library for some time; he sat in the dusky, massive room wondering why he should listen so eagerly for Cordelia's step. When she did come down—she had finally surrendered and written him a pitiful, urgent little note complaining of his neglect and her loneliness, and declaring that she must see him at once—she stepped before him resplendent in a shimmering gown of salmon-colored liberty satin, which looked almost yellow in the softened lamplight, subdued by her own careful hand. She was more nervous than she appeared, and she was glad of the half-lights. She had long since discovered that the library was the one room in the Spaulding household where one could sit in assured solitude. The Spauldings, indeed, were not a bookish family, Alfred Spaulding always briskly protesting that he preferred living life to reading it. And when it came to a matter of recreation, he used to say, sixty miles in an automobile knocked the daylights out of sixty chapters of romantic philanderings.
Cordelia came over to Hartley almost timidly, and looked up at him out of her eyes after the manner of a child who had done wrong and had been punished, and was repentant once more.
She was startled to notice the change in him, to see how attenuated and drawn his face was, how worn he looked about the eyes.
"My poor boy!" There was much of the maternal in that little cry. "My poor boy, what is it?" she asked with trembling lip, in her earnestness taking his hand once more.
"Oh, it's nothing. I've been working jolly hard and got a little under the weather," he explained. He could never endure sympathy.
"And you never told me!" There was a touch of more than kindness, of more than melancholy reproof, in the unconsciously softened voice. It seemed to rend all the fogs that had muffled and darkened life.
"And now, heigho, I feel like a holiday!" he cried as he told her, half ashamed of the softer mood that stole over him, how much had been accomplished with The Unwise Virgins.
"Why, surely you haven't finished it—so soon?"
"Not finished, altogether, but the bulk of the work is done."
"The bulk done!" She was thinking of her months of silent and agonized labor—her labor that had been lost.
"Yes, now the work of the file remains—and that's easy."
Was it so easy? she was wondering.
Cordelia, he thought, did not appear able to share in his enthusiasm. She seemed to take no delight in what he had called their common accomplishment. She accepted it all very quietly, and did not even ask when she might see the manuscript. He had expected her to be more openly interested, at any rate, and was momentarily chilled and puzzled at her unlooked-for indifference. Then some gleam of light seemed to come to him, for looking at her again, she smiled up at him through her still gentle glance of reproach.
"Did you forget? This is my first night."
"Your first night?" He felt that their lives had been strangely divided of late, that he was looking out on her existence as through a floating veil, or as one looks from a tower on a windy world.
"Yes, to-night The Silver Poppy has its first performance—it's first performance in town, I mean."
He had forgotten it completely, shamefully. But it brought him a relieving touch of happiness; he understood now why she had elbowed into the background the thing that had stood out so important to him. He was trying to explain away his stupidity and to laugh away his absent-mindedness when Mrs. Spaulding's voice sounded in the hall.
Cordelia suddenly turned to him.
"You'll come with us to-night, of course?"
He tried to draw back.
"Do!" she pleaded. "I've been—been depending on you. I'd feel more confident if you were along with me. We have a lower box, and there'll be just the four of us. Do come."
"But are you sure you want an outsider along?" he asked dubiously, annoyed at his own pettishness.
"Quite sure," she said, and though his eyes avoided her own as she spoke those two monosyllables, he could guess from the vibrant tone of her voice just what expression she wore.
He agreed to go, then, gladly enough.
"And you deserve some fun, anyway," she said happily, "after being penned up this way."
"Yes, I'd like to drink in a little of the fulness and color of existence now, for a change. I feel like taking life down in gulps."
"Of course you do—then let's begin to-night. Is it a pledge?"
"It is. And here's to the fulness of life."
"The fulness of life—shake on it, as they say down in my country."
From that first-night performance of Cordelia's much-talked-of drama Hartley carried away many mixed feelings.
It was when the perfunctory applause that came at the end of the first act had died dishearteningly away that Cordelia had turned to him and confessed, as though acting under some sudden impulse, that the work of making the play from her book had not been performed by her alone.
"They insisted on having their own men do it," she explained. "They keep men under salary for just that sort of thing."
"But your name's on every spare fence-board in the city," almost gasped Hartley.
"Yes, I know; theyinsistedthat I should stand as both author and playwright. I fought against it from the first, but it was useless. They said it would be worth so much more to them that way."
She looked at him questioningly. "But it makes me feel like a thief," she sighed. She was hidden out of sight in a dusky corner of the box, and he could not see her face. He looked out at the audience and said nothing.
It was at the end of the third act that the first touch of enthusiasm fell on the house. Cordelia, bending forward with newly awakened interest, was listening to the continued applause abstractedly but eagerly, almost hungrily, Hartley thought.
It was then that Zillinger, the manager of the house, all but burst into the box, excited, hot, perspiring.
"They're calling for you, Miss Vaughan," he cried under his breath, holding the door for her. And listening, she could hear the distant insistent cry of "Author! Author!"
Cordelia hesitated a moment. Zillinger was motioning energetically toward the narrow little aperture that led back of the boxes into the stage. They were shaking the curtain to sustain the hand. Cordelia looked at Hartley with a mute question in her eyes.
"For God's sake, quick—they'recallingyou!" cried Zillinger again, mopping his brow. Cordelia noticed Hartley's face—it stood out in the stronger glare from the footlights—and in it at that moment she seemed to read something for which she had been searching. She settled back in her chair.
"I can't come," she said simply.
Zillinger advanced as though to seize her bodily—he knew the pattering multitudinous voice of that vast stippled dragon and feared its caprices.
"They're keepin' it up foryou—yougotto!" he cried in desperation.
"They can keep it up till morning for all I care—I shall not come!"
Zillinger threw up his hands and rushed away, mopping his face and muffling his oaths with the same handkerchief.
Cordelia's hand sought Hartley's in the dusk of the half-lighted box.
"Bully!" was the only word he said, but she understood how much it meant, and it made her inordinately happy for all the rest of that night. She felt, in some way, that her life had approached its Great Divide.
He, with his blithe young bosom warm,Quite mad as any hatter,Just pipes and jigs through every storm,Sowhatcan winter matter!
He, with his blithe young bosom warm,Quite mad as any hatter,Just pipes and jigs through every storm,Sowhatcan winter matter!
John Hartley, "The Robin in Winter."
A great man? Impossible; he hasn't a dozen enemies!—"The Silver Poppy."
Those should have been happy days for Hartley, yet they were not. As to just why they were not he had decided to hold question with himself no longer. He was persuading himself to pick the flower, distrustful of his to-morrow.
He and Cordelia saw a great deal of each other, though he was puzzled often by the Indian Summer mood of tranquillity which seemed to have settled down upon her. Though no lightest word of love passed between them, she seemed to cling to him with a broken autumnal forlornness that touched him more than once as time went on.
Several days out of the week he dined with the Spauldings, and as the season advanced and the play-houses opened he saw himself more and more often a member of their merry little theater parties. They went once or twice to Cordelia's play, but her novel in its dramatized form was only a lukewarm success at its best, and was soon withdrawn. Yet going out "on the road" as "a New York triumph," it mysteriously took unto itself new life and prospered with sedate but substantial vigor.
Day by day Hartley's circle of acquaintances had enlarged—he became, in fact, a more or less popular young man—and he found it distinctly agreeable to catch an occasional smile from a carriage passing in the Park or on Riverside Drive, and to bow now and then to a familiar face on the crowded Avenue—there is only one. It was pleasant, too, to hold the reins and have Cordelia at his side in the Spauldings' spider phaeton, driving quietly home through the waning autumnal evenings after happy afternoons in the sun and open air.
What pleased him most, though, were their early morning rides in Central Park. Mrs. Spaulding had gladly enough placed her horses at his disposal—it was only too good of him to exercise the overfed beasts—and many were his merry canters along the bridle-paths, from which now and then he could catch glimpses of the crowded city that elbowed in on his solitude and gave him a thin, fragmentary feeling of truancy, like a summer runaway who had wandered into sound of the familiar old admonitory school-bell. Cordelia soon formed the habit of joining him in these rides, though for a girl from Kentucky and one who had always made much of her love of horseflesh, she was not a good rider. She explained this by the fact that she had fallen out of practise, for one thing, and for another, that since Firefly, her old Kentucky thoroughbred, had run away with her at home she always felt more or less nervous in the saddle. Hartley took her in hand, accordingly, and coached her at great pains and with much patience, and as she learned to sit more comfortably on her mount her strange fear melted away. As she discovered, too, that the daily gallop in the morning air was bringing more vigor to her limbs and a fresher color to her cheeks, her Southern dislike for all such active exercise soon passed away.
Under Hartley's influence she even took to walking, though her first lesson with that somewhat thoughtless instructor left her so fatigued in body and nerve, and with such sadly blistered feet, that she had to keep to her bed for the day following their tramp up and down the entire length of Riverside Drive. But of this Hartley knew nothing.
Besides these many hours in the open air together there was an occasional luncheon at Sherry's, and rustling, odorous, subduedmusicalesand recitals at Mendelssohn Hall, and now and then a supper at the Waldorf after the theater, and a merry four-in-hand load or two during the month to Ardsley, and suburban automobile jaunts, and sufficient things of a like nature to cause Hartley to keep a judicious eye on his engagement list and to question himself no longer as to whether or not he was wringing the color out of life.
"Cordelia and you seem to be made for each other," said Mrs. Spaulding at supper one evening in her own dining-room, after a charity dance at the Waldorf. "At one time I actually thought the child would never care for anything but books or what the newspapers were saying about her."
Mrs. Spaulding had drunk of her third bottle of champagne, and her voice was not so carefully modulated as it might have been. Cordelia heard the speech with painfully flushing face.
"And some day she'll go back to her books again," she said as she swept from the room in a rage. Hartley was giving all his attention to his Madeira jelly. Mrs. Spaulding looked after her with blank and uncomprehending eyes.
"Poor dear!" she murmured. "She's such a silly, frail little thing. When I see her in the hands of you men I feel exactly the same as I do when Alfred gets handling my chinaware. And she's such a trustful child, too! If it wasn't for her faith in you, really I'd tremble for her future."
Then Mrs. Spaulding filled Hartley's glass and light-headedly declared that she had got hold of him just in time to save him from being a monk.
Yet Hartley was not altogether idle during these weeks. Each day he threw a little sop of work to the Cerberus of conscience, adding from time to time the finer touches to the manuscript of The Unwise Virgins while it still lay before him in the rough. This treatment resulted in an unexpected expansion of the story itself and left his pages in a sadly undecipherable condition. Even he himself, however, could see how those touches of after-thought were altering his earlier effort and rounding out his severer structure into a work of more Gothic richness.
One Sunday afternoon late in October he carried the completed manuscript over to Cordelia. A recent rain had washed the streets from curb to curb, and under foot flagstone and asphalt lay clean as steel. There was a cool freshness in the air, and the vigorous exercise as he went swinging down the river front sent the blood bounding through his veins once more. He stopped to watch the sea-gulls wheeling and dipping above the gray waters of the Hudson—the sight of them filled him with a sudden restless passion for a freedom that still seemed to have eluded him. Then he turned to the Drive itself, and let his eyes rest on the stream of flashing horses and hurrying carriages. He remembered what the Spauldings' coachman had confided to him only a few days before: "They don't last long in the city, sir, them horses; it shakes the shoulders off 'n them."
He found Cordelia, excepting the servants, alone in the house. The Spauldings had left the day before for Canada, she told him. Mrs. Spaulding was to stay in Quebec City, while her husband—who had always been fond of shooting—went north for moose. He had found it possible to snatch a three weeks' belated vacation before the winter set in, Cordelia explained, and described with not a little wit the sternness with which he had arisen and dragged away a complaining and none too willing wife.
"Our American husbands, you know, usually show more velvet than claws," she added.
She was gowned in a tightly fitting tailor-made dress of bottle green, trimmed with gold. It seemed to deepen the color of her hair and at the same time to give a touch of girlishness to her figure. She guessed at once what Hartley held in his hand.
"I wonder if it could ever be a Silver Poppy the second?" he asked, as he handed the manuscript over to her. Her mind flashed back to the birth of that earlier book, and for a moment she looked hesitatingly up at him.
"I'd rather read it alone," she said. "Do you mind?"
"I'd rather you did," he answered, wondering at the sudden little sternness that had come over her. It seemed like the shadow on quiet water of a taloned bird he could not see.
"Then I'll leave you in the library to smoke. You said you wanted to see the press notices of the play—I think they'll keep you enough amused," she held the heavyportièresaside for him. Then she brought him her huge, heavy scrap-book, and lingered a moment before the mantelpiece mirror while he turned over a few of its first pages.
"May I look over all of it?" he asked, with his head bent over the closely pasted pages of clippings.
"Yes, do; some day I'm going to call that book The Price of Fame."
He looked up from a page he had been glancing over, where a paragraph, more faded than the others about it, caught his eye.
"Who is Fanny Rice?" he asked.
She was fixing her hair before the mirror and did not turn away from it as she answered, after a moment's pause:
"She's my cousin—in Kentucky."
And as he dipped from page to page into notices from newspapers and illustrated interviews from weeklies and studies from critical reviews, frowning over some, laughing over others, she slipped away and left him.
An hour glided past and Cordelia did not return. Hartley took up a novel from the table, and when another long hour dragged on he became uneasy. He went to the foot of the stairs and called her. Then he rang for the servants, but could get no response to his summons; they were all either out at the moment or beyond sound of the bells.
He went to her study and tapped on the door. Hearing no sound, he opened it and glanced in, but she was not there. He hesitated a moment, then went from silent room to room through the great, quiet house in search of her.
He found her at last in a nook of the upper west hall, which he had heard Mrs. Spaulding speak of as the Quietude. She was bending over the last pages of his manuscript in the paling evening light at the window, curled up, cat-like, in a huge armchair. Her lips were slightly parted, and as her white face bent over those last pages of his story some eager, luminous hunger that dwelt in her eyes held Hartley spellbound. He watched her without speaking.
When the last page was read she looked up slowly and let her absent eyes dwell on him as her lips murmured something he could not catch. Then he laughed a little and stepped toward her through the twilight.
At his first step he saw that he had been mistaken. She had neither heard nor seen him. But she did not cry out, only a deadly whiteness swept over her already pale face, and she put her hand up to her heart with a quick little motion.
In a moment her fright had passed and she could breathe naturally once more. The pale color crept slowly back into her face.
"I thought something might have happened," he said weakly.
"How you startled me!" she gasped, growing calmer as she spoke. Then she shook her white skirts out and sat up more decorously in the chair. "You must promise me never to do it again," she said softly. "It's heredity with me, I think, for my old mammy nurse once told me it was a fright that really killed my mother. You'll promise, won't you?"
She looked at him with solemn eyes. The gray twilight fell across her face and melted into the gold of her hair. Her bottle-green gown seemed black in the dusk, and her pale features, freighted with an elusive and wistful pathos, seemed to Hartley, in that minute of fleeting but vivid impression, like the face of some sweet lady of forgotten centuries gazing out of the gloom of an old canvas. It was a face that held him musingly spellbound, in which he could see and dream of things that were not there, as in a fire by night or in a fountain by day.
He dropped on his knees beside her and caught her hands. She could see the sudden flame of tumultuous love and of desire that burned through him, and she drew away, strangely, almost in terror.
"No, no!" she cried in a low voice. "Not now! Not here!"
She pressed away from him, as from a danger, though on his face was nothing but tenderness and pleading. She shrank from him hesitatingly, as though the cup of devotion that he held up to her was something too costly for her to taste.
A hurrying and startled chambermaid turning on the light brought them back from that garden of enchantment into which youth can wander but seldom. There was nothing left for them to do but walk soberly down through the long halls of the quiet house to the library once more. Yet all the while Cordelia seemed to be fighting some silent and inward battle, to be swayed by some great conflict of emotion that trampled from her the many long-thought-of things she had to say, as cavalry tramples a field once golden with wheat.
She was silent and restless and nervous until Hartley gathered up the scattered pages of The Unwise Virgins and put them in order on the library table. Then she looked into his eyes and murmured tenderly, and under the stress of a sudden impulse:
"I'm proud of you, so proud of you, my big boy!"
He looked down into her face—into her face, that he felt could change like water. It was dignified, glorified by a light that he had seldom seen on a woman's countenance, and it left him happy once more. The artist in him, receiving its dole, elbowed the man in him slowly aside.
"Then itwilldo?" he asked.
"It is all strength and all beauty," she said simply. Then she added in another voice, "You have made me very humble."
She sighed pitifully as she looked at the pile of written pages.
"I have only imitated you," he declared.
"Imitated me?" she echoed.
"Yes. All along it was The Silver Poppy that was my model—that I tried to follow from first to last."
"I feel as though you had given me a mental flogging," she broke in. "None of this is mine!Noneof it," she cried passionately. "None of it, by right," she added as she gazed at the topmost sheet. "I was only the mouse who pulled the thorn out of the lion's paw, and look what he has done for me."
"But see what you have done, what you are doing forme!" he cried impetuously. "And see what you can do, what some day you must do."
She held up a hand as though to bar it back, as though it were something that still confounded her better judgment and might lead to lifelong mistakes and sorrows.
Then he added, more gently: "Every page of this, Cordelia, is quite as much yours as mine. You suggested it, you inspired it. If it were not for you, dear, it should never have been written."
His hand was on the throttle of sacrifice, and he seemed bent on racing the engine of self-abnegation to its last wheel-turn. Her face lighted up with a new and fierce fire as he spoke. He wondered if that happy smile was born of his first more intimate use of her Christian name.
"Butyouhave done it all!" she reiterated.
"Two authors always have to drive tandem in a case like this."
"How it will succeed!" she said dreamily. "You would hardly believe me if I should tell you how much we shall make out of this."
He turned and resolutely tied up the loose pages. The flush of a new energy was on him.
"What are you going to do?" she asked quickly.
"I'm going at it again—I've had a dozen ideas while you've been talking to me—I feel that I'vegotto go at it tooth and nail again."
"And it's agreed that you take one-half the royalties?" she broke in.
"No, no; the name, the start—that's quite all I ask."
She did not understand. "The start?"
"Yes, I can wait until I write my own book for dollars and royalties, and all that sort of thing.NowI'm glad enough to stand humbly beside you."
Still she did not seem to understand. He felt that she was tired and shaken.
"Why, I'm unknown, Cordelia, and you're famous. Think what it will mean for me—The Unwise Virgins, by Cordelia Vaughan and John Hartley!"
She turned toward him quickly. He caught the startled look in her eyes, and wondered at it. She tried to call up a smile; he could see her lips twitch uselessly, like a desperate pilot tugging at a broken signal-wire.
"Oh-h-h," she said softly, at last, "I hadn't thought of that!"
As he passed under her window he looked back at her through the gathering darkness. She stood in the half-lighted window-square vacantly, wide-eyed, wondering. He waved his hand back at her, lightly, but she did not seem to see him. And he wondered what element in the picture which that half-lighted window framed made him think of Perseis as she watched the trireme of Ulysses swing up the sands of Ææa. He knew but one thing, and that he knew assuredly. He loved her with all the strength of his heart.